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08 July 2017

Einsame Klasse by Eva Gesine Baur: A Review

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Last Goddess Blog

When the readers of this blog become contributors, I'm ecstatic because I've always envisioned this space as a collaborative one with no borders and no language barriers. Below is a review by Horst Zumkley of one of the latest German-language Marlene Dietrich biographies, as well as my clunky English translation. Please share your thoughts in the comments section, especially if you've read the book!

This book on the life of Marlene Dietrich, which appeared punctually on the 25th anniversary of her death, contains no special news or even secrets compared to the many other biographies about the star. The book, however, is remarkably different in several respects. In it, the author has two central theses: Marlene Dietrich was (1) a lonely person her whole life and (2) deeply insecure because she did not consider herself beautiful or a gifted actor.

In a newspaper interview, Eva Gesine Baur says:

"But she still felt lonely. Her daughter said this was an attitude. After a profound [examination] of Marlene’s correspondences, I come to a different view. Through all her correspondences, loneliness is like a leading motive. Nobody is more lonely than an extremely polygamous person. The feeling of being lonely also comes from the feeling of being not understood. Marlene was deeply insecure and depressed all her life. "And:The "uncertainty ... was already the reason for Marlene’s perfection delusion during her successful years: she found herself neither beautiful nor a gifted actor. When she was old she did not even want to show herself to her closest friends. She thought she was worth nothing, as she was no longer the idol which she had made herself--even outwardly. The retreat was the price, a high price she paid for not damaging her perfect image. "(Frankfurter Neue Presse, 09.05.2017).

On these central theses the whole book is focused and selectively written.In addition, we are not dealing with a biography in the usual sense, but with a fictionalized biography. This means that Baur portrays biographical facts, then adds thoughts and inner experiences of the acting person(s) and elaborates the situations, as if she herself had been there, which creates a reconstructed picture.

In the biographical portrayal, she cites in the text many occasionally long passages (in each case in italics) from all sorts of "sources", which she combines and then continues herself seamlessly, as if they were from a single source. This continues throughout the text, and there is almost no page without quotes. In this way, a thesis-driven, biographical collage about Marlene’s life emerges.

The portrayal of Dietrich's life story is, moreover, still extensive, but selective, linked to the accompanying historical, i.e. political, cultural, social and economic events of this time.

The first chapters of Dietrich's life story up to about 1930, written in their social context at the time, are entertaining and fluent. This is probably due to the fact that the focus of the narrative on the author's two theses, as well as the "fictionalisation" of facts, are not so much in the foreground.

From then on, however, the crux of the book changes. Progressing to the last chapter, the leading theses seem to have become more and more an “obsessive idea" of the writer's work.

It is very tiring to read through pages and pages of more and more "proof" of the alleged "loneliness" and "feelings of inferiority" of Marlene: from book publications, memoirs, exchanges, interviews, personal communications, telegrams, press reports, etc., from which emerges a collaged image:

- Dietrich spent her entire life compensating for her feelings of inferiority. And:- Over time, the problems of this beautiful woman’s aging led to intensified efforts for "conquests" and, with increasing age, handicaps and diseases also led to a change of her character: pedantry, intellectual arrogance, mistrust, ingratitude become the central features of Dietrich and lead to a retreat and a burden on their social relations.

With this one-sided caricature of the life of Marlene Dietrich, the hypotheses of the author are almost "confirmed". The reader fails to even partially appreciate her artistic work as an actress and singer, her engagement in the war, and her commitment and willingness to help friends and emigrants. The author has lost the necessary distance from her subject, and, therefore, the book with its one-sided focus is more than unsatisfactory.

Eva Gesine Baur undoubtedly possesses historical knowledge and has studied, cited and processed many sources, and she spreads in the book a seemingly endless abundance of diverse details, biographical and otherwise.

But the way she processes the facts is problematic, indeed unscientific: the relationships between the text and the sources and notes are, if at all apparent, flimsy. You will look in vain to find precisely from where Baur cited her sources, e.g., quotations, dates, and page numbers. So, for the reader nothing is really verifiable

There is nothing "right" about this book: it is not a "real" biography (due to the fictionalisation), nor a "real" novel (because then the cited sources make no sense), nor a "proper" literature review (because it’s too fictional, and too unscientific). The book is a bit of everything, a peculiar, collage-like botch-job, albeit of a lonely class.

Let us, finally, cite Marlene Dietrich herself: The documentary film "Marlene" (1984) by Maximian Schell starts with Marlene’s offscreen voice, stating: "I read books, you are never lonely with a book. No, I never feel lonely!"

4 comments:

Thanks a lot the article and its translation (for me it's much easier to read English than German). Marlene Dietrich feeling that she was "worth nothing" sounds very strange. According to her correspondence and other documents (diaries) there were times when she felt loneliness in N.Y. and in Paris or in a hotel suite somewhere during tours. But I guess such occasional feelings are very common and prove absolutely nothing. Naturally she was lonely in later years, especially on Sundays and during holidays. But judging by her remarks and letters I never thought that she felt that she was worth nothing. The whole idea sounds ridiculous to me. I think, she knew exactly what she was worth as an actress, singer and performer. She knew her limitations too as Kenneth Tynan put it.

The book is not so bad as Zumkley says. Yes, it is always tiring to read the same stories again and Baur isn't at all interested in the films Marlene did. I guess that she hasn't seen most of them. But at least she has a thesis which she follows and she does it quite strikingly. And if you remember what Marlene said about all her friends including Sternberg (nuts, idiots, amateurs, gaga) you may consider that there is some truth in the thesis of "Loneliness". The line from Schells documentary doesn't proove the opposite. That was just her way to reject any personal or private questions. And resding books and newspapers only without any social life surely will sure make you lonely quickly. At least the book is better than the new one about Marlene and her sister which has no thesis at all and nothing new to tell except a few dates for her sister. Werner

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